By Russ Ebbets
TC editor Russ Ebbets has a wide-ranging conversation with former Canadian distance ace Bruce Kidd. The discussion includes Bruce’s early development, Coach Fred Foot and the East York Track Club, the running successes and failures, and sport today.
As a 19-year-old you were Athlete of the Year in Canada. When did the penny drop that your running career would not be an ever-widening spiral of success? Did that realization put extra pressure on you to “accomplish more?”
While I always thought that I would get stronger and faster, I never felt that track would go on forever. In the amateur environment in which I trained and competed it was taken for granted that one’s athletic career would probably end with university graduation. That meant that I only had a few years to accomplish my goals in track.
You were pretty much a cultural icon at 19 years old. How did you manage to continue to evolve as opposed to resting on your laurels or worse, going off the rails? I am sure the amateur nature of the sport had something to do with this but there had to also be some decision-making on your part.
I had teammates who kept me grounded. After my breakthrough year in 1961, I lost my very first race in 1962. Jim Snider gave me a novel entitled Yesterday’s Hero. Fred Foot (no “e”) was a master at perspective. After a breakthrough race or prestigious award, he would give me a day or two to relish it, then remind me that the other major runners in the world were training hard, achieving great performances, and I had to get back to work. “That Zimny in Poland,” he would say ….
The Olympic super stars that immediately preceded you in the longer distances were Vladimir Kuts and Emil Zatopek. What were your expectations or the team chatter in your late teen years in this regard?
Fred brought back stories of Kuts from the 1956 Olympics, where he was the Canadian coach, and my father, who covered the 1952 Olympics for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, regaled me with stories of Zatopek. Some members of the East York Track Club subscribed to international magazines, like Athletics Weekly, Track & Field News, and Leichathletik. So, I had some idea of the international standard. But among the media and the sports-loving public in late 1950s Toronto, international track could have been on Mars. Very few people knew how fast people were running internationally.
You mention in your memoir (A Runner’s Journey) meeting both Gerry Lindgren and Jim Ryun at the Cow Palace where you counseled them on their burgeoning abilities. Do you remember what you talked about?
People had told them that the huge mileage and tough workouts they were doing would ruin their health. They knew that I had done the same. So they sought me out to ask what I thought. I reassured them that if they felt good and recovered properly from hard workouts, they should stay the course.
The family life of an athlete is formative in countless ways. They say that the first task of an Olympian is to choose one’s parents carefully. It seems you made an extremely wise choice here. What was unique or notable about the home environment your parents created that was expansive in nature, encouraging and supportive?
My parents encouraged my siblings and me to follow whatever paths we wanted and gave us the confidence and emotional support to do so. My father once told a reporter that he didn’t care what it was that I became interested in, as long it fully engaged me, was healthy and made a social contribution. Both of my parents sought to make a difference in their professional and community projects, so that was a powerful example.
In your opinion, specifically and in general, what role do parents play in an athlete’s life?
Today it’s much different than it was in the 1950s and 1960s, when athletes like me relied primarily or entirely upon public institutions. Given the systematic immiseration of public institutions over the last 40 years, today’s parents must be much more proactive in finding and financing opportunities in sports, culture, and education, mediating/problem-solving when their children encounter challenges, and providing emotional and strategic support. The best ones constitute incredible resources. But overall, the requirement for significant parental support exacerbates the widening inequalities in sports opportunity in Canada and the United States. Poor and single-parented kids rarely make it to the top in the Olympic sports these days. Most national team members are drawn from the upper middle classes, with two highly educated parents.
One’s immediate physical environment also plays a critical role in development. Ten years ago, I gave a seminar in Toronto and stayed at a friend’s house in the Beaches. As we walked the shoreline of Lake Ontario I felt an overwhelming sense that this was Shangri-La for a runner not realizing that this was your old stomping grounds. What role did growing up in this area of Toronto play for you?
The Beach in the 1950s was a wonderful place to learn sports, especially for boys. It was safe, you could run for miles along the lake, there were excellent facilities, inspiring local championship teams, professional and Olympic athletes, and widespread encouragement. Everyone you met talked supportively about sports.
I noticed in the documentary Runner that you were a forefoot striker. Did you run your 10k’s and longer on your toes? Even when you trained for longer distance runs and the marathon?
I ran with a forefoot strike at all distances up until 1965, when a post-Tokyo reconstruction of both ankles led me to run with a heel strike. The doctors who operated on me were convinced that the forefoot strike had contributed to the injuries.
The Runner clip also showed you running barefoot for either a warm-up or warm-down. How much of that type of running did you do? Did you quantify this with miles or minutes or yards? Was this encouraged by Coach Foot?
No, I just ran barefoot after races when my feet were blistered or burning, and I could cool off on the grass. I never trained barefoot.
Your arm action was unique with the hands pronated (palms down) that gave the appearance of doing the swimming stroke of the “dog paddle.” How or why did that come about?
That developed when I started training with the East York Track Club and all the workouts were short sprints. To minimize tying up, I would throw down my arms to relax my upper body and it stuck, even as I moved up to longer distances. After that, I tried to smooth out my arm action, but I never was completely successful. To this day, I wish we had spent more time on that.
In the years 1959 to 1964 what was your weekly mileage? How did it vary throughout the year?
I didn’t keep an exact diary, but we said about 100 miles, divided between an early morning jog, intervals in the evening Monday to Friday, races on Saturday and a long easy run on Sunday. In the spring, summer, and early fall, we ran on a track. We trained on grassy hills in the late fall and early spring, and indoors December to March.
In the late 1950’s and early 60’s Percy Cerutty and Arthur Lydiard’s influence on running training was in its ascendency. How familiar were you, at that time, with their methods, philosophies, and techniques?
I met both, but never developed a conversation. They just wanted to tell me what to do. As a result, I only knew of their methods from reading the newspapers, which wasn’t a very reliable source.
You had contact with Lydiard’s and Cerutty’s athletes – Murray Halberg and Bill Baillie (Lydiard), Albie Thomas and Dave Stephens (Cerutty); was there much discussion of training? Did you have much contact with Herb Elliott or Peter Snell?
While I talked to Halberg and Baillie quite a bit in those years, it was mostly about racing tactics. I never talked to Thomas or Snell about training. I never met Stephens or Elliott.
There is a famous incident where Lydiard supposedly watched you grind out 60 second after 60 second 400’s in preparation for the Commonwealth Games 10k where he felt you ran yourself into exhaustion. Several questions 1) did this happen? 2) were you aware Lydiard was there and were you trying to impress him? 3) did you regret doing that workout in hindsight?
That was in Tokyo prior to the 10K. I can’t remember if I knew Lydiard was there. It was a beautiful day, one of the few warm, sunny days, and although I was only supposed to run a few 400s, I felt so great I just kept going and I did about 20. Fred, who only arrived in Tokyo the following day, was furious. I’ve always regretted it
Regarding overtraining and over-racing, you mentioned several times in your book that you raced as many as 48 times in a year, and one would assume that included multiple 5k’s, 10k’s or longer distances. Do you remember how many 5 or 10k’s were in that 48 races?
Of the 48 races I ran in 1962, 23 were three miles or longer, including one 15 miler on the road, and several longer cross country races.
Mihály Iglói was a coach who had remarkable success in the late 50’s and early 60’s (Sándor Iharos, István Rózsavölgyi, László Tábori, Bob Schul and Jim Beatty) that set upwards of 50 world records. Did you have any contact with him? He was famous for his “book” in which he kept meticulous records and projected performances of his athletes – did you ever see the book or was that “top secret?”
I ran against all those men and met Iglói many times. I’ve always regretted that I never managed a real discussion with him. I found him shy and correct in his answers. He never seemed to warm up or relax. Of course, it could have been me putting him off—I was young and probably to him very forward. Fred seemed to have a good relationship with him, as did former teammates Jim Snider and Orville Atkins who ran with him later. I never understood the thinking behind his workouts—those endless straightaways—but I’m sure I could have learned from him. I never saw his ‘book’.
What about Franz Stampfl? Were his training methods a frequent topic of discussion with the East York Track Club? Especially after his success with Bannister and his later successes in Australia?
We knew his name and I briefly met him but we knew very little about his methods.
What was the environment of the East York Track Club (EYTC)? How did that change as you matured from a 15-year-old to a Commonwealth Games Champion?
It was very stimulating—everyone talked track, supported each other and enjoyed being there. For the most part, it was an adult club, so everyone chose to be there. Fred was a respected, even loved coach. It was already accomplished, with athletes representing Canada internationally, breaking records and winning championships, so it effused confidence. I think the only significant change that occurred after I arrived was that the focus gradually switched from the sprints to the middle and longer distances.
Who were some of your athletic heroes when you were growing up?
I looked up to many of the local men in the Beach who played sports, like Mr. Godfrey, one of my friends’ fathers who played semi-pro softball at Kew Gardens and Pete Bennett, who played Canadian football for the professional Argos, both of whom lived across the street. I also admired the pros I saw in person and on television, like hockey player Ted Kennedy of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Jean Beliveau of the Montreal Canadiens and baseball player Sam Jethroe of the Toronto Maple Leafs (triple A). I don’t remember one I looked up to above all, there were so many.
Would you say the EYTC was a nurturing environment initially or were you ignored? As you became the 17-year-old sensation did that generate petty jealousies, or did it encourage the rest of the team to greater things?
It was tremendously nurturing. The older runners, especially Jim Snider, Bryan Emery and Stan Worsfold, looked out for me right from the beginning. I don’t think there were very many jealousies. Once I started receiving race invitations, Fred promoted Bill Crothers, and when meets invited both of us, Fred would insist upon a relay team, so we brought our teammates along.
Bruce, you excelled at all phases of running winning the USA National XC Meet at Van Cortlandt, running undefeated on the boards at Madison Square Garden and your successes in outdoor track. Did you prefer one discipline over the others? How difficult was it for you to “always” be ready to race?
I think two miles indoors was my favourite distance, but outdoors, it was three miles or 5,000. Our philosophy was to be ready to race every day, and Fred would often surprise us with time trials, so we got used to running hard at a moment’s notice.
It seems that your 2-mile race Boston AA victory was your breakthrough race. What was your lasting memory of that experience?
I’ve distilled that race through films, clippings, and stories ever since, but I do have an unfiltered memory of my gut fear when Pete McArdle tried to close the gap over the last two laps of the race. I thought I could hear him breathing down my neck. It was such a relief to reach the tape.
In many respects your early indoor career was contested during the heyday of indoor track and field in the US – iconic venues, big crowds, small board tracks and smoky arenas. What did you like most (or least) about those times and events?
I loved the close-in, circus-like atmosphere of indoor track, with formally dressed officials, the organist giving every runner a signature tune (and in longer races, playing the leader’s tune to the tempo of the race), the jostling around tight corners, and the camaraderie it encouraged among athletes. What I hated was the smoke, beer and food smells. I was sick after every indoor race I ran.
Bill Crothers (OG silver medalist to Peter Snell, Tokyo, 1964) was a superstar in his own right but his success came after yours. What role did he play in your development?
Bill and I trained differently, ran different distances, and had different personalities and strengths. But we became good teammates, respected and learned from each other.
Were Lorne Michaels (Saturday Night Live fame), W.H. Auden (the poet) and Dick Gregory (the comedian) celebrities who briefly came into your life or did you get to know them more on a personal level?
I got to know Lorne well in the late 1960s and early 1970s because we were married to first cousins and we all spent a lot of time together. We’ve stayed in touch ever since. I never met Auden, although he turned an interview Don Owen did with me into the commentary for the film, Runner. While I only met Gregory a few times, we spent a memorable evening together once in Toronto when he outlined his ideas about an Olympic boycott to protest racism in sports
You mentioned that Fred Foot did not have a track background. Where did he get his coaching direction from? Was he an advocate of Cerutty, Lydiard, Stampfl or Iglói or somebody else? There were few books in the late 50’s and 60’s – do you remember anything that he frequently referenced?
No, Fred ran sprints and 800 metres during the 1930s for the Toronto Achilles. In fact, he was so good that the Toronto police gave him a civilian job so that he could race for the Toronto police in the big inter-city meets that were held in those years. He worked for the police for more than 40 years, eventually becoming their budget chief. After WW2, Fred and several Achilles teammates formed the East York Track Club and Fred became the coach. He was entirely self-taught by observation and trial and errors. I don’t think he read any books about coaching.
Did Coach Foot have any go-to words of wisdom that have stayed with you throughout your life?
Fred’s confidence that if you worked hard at something you could always do it well and his lifelong commitment to volunteer service have always stayed with me. One of his favourite sayings was “keep it short”, which literally meant “don’t overstride” and metaphorically I’ve always taken to mean “be true to yourself”.
Was the attempted Commonwealth triple of 1962 in Perth deemed a possibility due to Zatopek’s triple in Helsinki? Whose idea was the Commonwealth triple (5000, 10K and marathon)? If it was yours, did anyone try to talk you out of it?
It was my idea, in emulation of Zatopek. Also, I wasn’t sure I would have another chance. Fred and several others (even Murray Halberg) tried to talk me out of it, but I was so full of myself, I rejected their efforts. It was a naïve idea—I had never run a marathon, knew nothing about the nutritional and hydration requirements, etc., and had been primarily doing speed work while in Perth. If I really wanted to triple, I should have run the mile. Along with that Tokyo workout, it’s one of the few decisions I wish I had again.
Some highly motivated athletes use a poor performance as motivation to redouble their efforts, frequently driving them deeper and deeper into an overtrained state. Do you feel that was a problem for you?
That was probably the case during the summer of 1964. Every time I ran a mediocre race, I would step up the mileage. In addition to my two workouts a day, I had a demanding summer job working as a reporter for the Toronto Star, because I rejected the advice from Fred and teammates to take the summer off. I was always tired. It wasn’t a great time.
The weight of great expectations. This is one of the things about sport I think many “regular” people cannot identify with. One of the things I observed at Villanova firsthand was the level of expectations the Irish athletes were bridled with. The stress of their internal drive and pressure to succeed was compounded by the ever present external pressures (family, friends, coaches, press, national expectations, etc.) which for the Irish were further compounded by the measure of their “success” being Ron Delany, 1956 Olympic gold medalist in the 1500. At what point in your life did you start to feel this? And what pressures do you feel you left behind for the succeeding generations of Canadian runners? (It’s worth mentioning that your 5k junior world record remained a Canadian junior record for 54 years).
I certainly felt these pressures. As I won more races internationally, they increased significantly. Boston was a big turning point, because after that people thought I was always running for “Canada”. Because very few people in Canada knew anything about the world list, it was expected that I would always win. In Tokyo, I was overwhelmed with telegrams from people I never knew. To the extent I “froze” in Tokyo, it was because as I lined up at the start of the 10K, I was numb from the weight of those expectations.
But I should also say that I came to accept these pressures as responsibilities—to represent Canada and Canadian sport well. As I outline in my memoir, A Runner’s Journey, it took some time to learn how to do this, with more than a few mistakes along the way, but eventually I came to turn that pressure into a position of influence and use it to argue for progressive change in sports.
The Tokyo 1964 10,000m – In the postscript of my 2001 interview (Track Coach #158) with Billy Mills Track & Field News detailed the race participants that included 10 current or former world record holders, Olympic medalists, Pan American or Commonwealth Champions. One could make the argument this was the finest collection of talent an Olympic 10,000 ever had. For you it has to rank among your greatest disappointments. In retrospect, what do you feel went wrong? If you had it to do over again, what would have been done differently?
As I’ve said in my memoir, I regret I did that hard workout so close to the race—that left me physically flat. But most of all, I wish I had entered the race in a completely different frame of mind. Instead of thinking that any result less than winning was a failure, I wish I had welcomed the opportunity of racing against so many fine runners and said to myself something like: “This is where you have always wanted to be. You’re in great shape. Enjoy the race and show them what you can do!”
As a writer your style has remarkable clarity, flow, and readability. Do you attribute that skill to your early newspaper background? Who are/were some of you favorite authors?
Thank you for your kind words. I have always enjoyed writing (although it can be excruciatingly hard). When I worked on the student newspaper as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, and in summer and part-time jobs I had for radio station CFRB and the Toronto Star, we often talked about what it took to write well, so that helped. My favourite writer in those years was A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker, both for his wide-ranging interests and his easy style. I also sought to emulate one of my teachers, the political economist C.B. Macpherson, who wrote about complex political theory in an extremely straightforward and cogent style.
Charlie Francis had an answer for every question and an opinion on everything else. When I interviewed him in 2002 (Track Coach #161) the question that stopped him was how did he get his sprint corps, once their ability made them consistent Olympic level finalists, to believe they could actually win? He said that was one of his greatest challenges. Do you see this as an example of the “second city mentality” of Canada due to the cultural sprawl the US has had over time?
The “second city mentality” has certainly been a burden in the Olympic sports in Canada, and many of us have tried very hard to change that. Today, there is a confident spirit in many sports, like women’s soccer, swimming, ice hockey, curling, rowing, and specific track events like the decathlon.
Much of your career preceded the professionalism of the sport apparent today. While you’ve never been one to stifle progress are there any things you miss about the “good old days?”
Bill Crothers, David Bailey, Abby Hoffman and other teammates from the 1960s often share the regret that Olympic sport now requires a full-time commitment, making it very difficult for top athletes to simultaneously develop a rewarding career, let alone enrich themselves culturally and intellectually through the international travel they do.
Throughout your post-competitive career you have been a national force promoting social equity, educational opportunity, support for sport all the while proving to be a tireless crusader to your political rivals. Who have been some of the formative figures that set you on this path and gave you inspiration to continue?
My parents always supported me in this, even when the media was howling, or people said I had to choose between sport and politics. I could look to exemplars within track, too. The British 10K runner Martin Hyman was an early inspiration because Martin trained and raced hard and was active in the anti-nuclear movement. Dick Gregory, Mal Whitfield, and Harry Edwards fought racism in sports in the United States. Ted Haydon, who coached me in the University of Chicago Track Club, was an influential mentor, because he not only believed you could do both sport and politics, but helped you schedule your workouts and races to make it possible.
I heard recently on American public radio a spot on Greenpeace dealing with the burnout their activists suffer as the “good fight” can become a Sisyphean task with the minor victories not enough to sustain one’s motivation in the face of challenges that seemingly present with a constantly “vanishing horizon.” How have you been able to maintain your motivation for the social changes you’ve advocated despite the political realities of society, economic interests, egos and human being’s natural resistance to change? How have you escaped the frustration, the self-doubts and private cynicisms that often accompany those who speak “truth to power?”
It’s been hard at times. I can’t remember how many times I’ve sung Leonard Cohen’s line—“they’ve sentenced us to 20 years “of boredom for trying to change the system from within”—to myself. But if I look back, I’ve seen significant, progressive change in the two institutions to which I’ve devoted myself—the university and sport and I’ve been able to contribute to it. That’s very encouraging. My metaphor is the track race when you’re completely boxed coming off the turn yet somehow it opens up and you have a clear path to the tape. As one of my teachers in first-year university (and Rhodes scholar track athlete) H.I. Macdonald used to say, “You never know unless you try.” I’ve also been lucky to work in or near athletic facilities most of my life, so when I got really depressed after a frustrating day, I would go up to the field house or down to the pool and just sit in the gallery. Seeing the joy of people training and coaching was usually enough to calm me down and push me to continue the fight.
What do you see as the two or three greatest challenges humankind will face in the next 25 years?
Global warming, increasing inequality and escalating xenophobia.
What role do you hope sport will play in helping to mitigate these challenges?
These are all difficult challenges for sport, because despite good intentions and soaring rhetoric in documents like the Olympic Charter, we’re still part of the problem. We still travel to participate in and enjoy competition with little thought to the carbon costs, or how they could be reduced in step with humanity’s requirements. In countries like Canada and the U.S., COVID has further exacerbated the frightening inequalities in access and opportunity. And as the debate on the boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics illustrates, the ideal of international, intercultural dialogue in sports as a way of reducing world tensions has little relevance for many people.
There are not easy solutions for any of these challenges. I think it’s urgently necessary for sports people—leaders, athletes, coaches, and journalists alike—to reject the preoccupation with “sport for sport’s sake” and spend time every day to inform ourselves about the environmental and social consequences of what we do, forge links with community organizations who worry about these issues and discuss what we can do. It means that we have to make sports governance much more democratic and athlete-inclusive. We don’t have much time. It may well be that governments will have to intervene with emergency powers, the way some have done during the pandemic, before sports and others can act. I hope that’s not the case.
I know that sports can help. Many athletes and sports organizations played an extremely constructive role in the early days of COVID—communicating public health messages and setting an example, helping people keep active safely as a way of staying resilient, and making facilities available for medical services, emergency shelters, food distribution, and so on. We must realize that we can never return to the pre-pandemic “normal”. We’re must fight for the future of the planet and our humanity.